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The content below is an excerpt from my extensive Conversion Rate Optimization online course I’m currently working on, and available to purchase online later in 2018. Click at the bottom of the article to be notified when the course is available.

[…] Now, let’s bite into a customer research phase. What is this and why do we need it?

Customer Research

Well, do you need customers? Yes – and you need to get to know them too. You see, without really understanding them and their needs you will have a very hard time delivering what they want – whether you are selling beach parasols, clothing or used cars.

As a store owner, you need to be on top of the trends – bah, even surpass them – to meet your customers’ expectations better than your competitors.

How do you do that?
By running a regular customer and market research.

Let’s keep our beach umbrella store example. In order for you to sell a lot of your products, you need to know what are your customers looking for from the products. Sturdiness? Compactability, so the umbrella can be folded easily and stored in a small car boot? Or perhaps UV protection, as the ozone layer problem is quite severe in the location you are selling at?

Research will put you ahead of your competitors

Not all customers are the same, and they all are looking for different features, often different each year. What might have worked for you last year [due to a rainy summer, people were looking for bigger umbrellas they could set up easily in their backyard, as they were not going to the beach], might not work for you this year [winds are coming, so everyone is looking for the best windproof beach parasols].

See – being close to the market and to your target customers will put you ahead of your competitorswho might be lacking on the research front and were not aware of the changing trends. So make a research as a compulsory task for you, performed on a regular basis.

What are the types of research?

Customer research [we’ll focus on it first]

Market research

Competitor research

Building Buyer Personas

Who is your target customer? Where do they live? What is their family situation, annual income, spending habits?

Knowing this will help you understand your customers better, get to know how they shop, and how much they are willing to spend. You will also understand what their main issues and problems are, so you could solve them better. And we already know that solving your customers’ problems is the most effective business strategy.

So how do we start our customer research?

We start from an internet search. Let’s say we want to find who is our ideal target customer for the beach umbrellas. We type in Google: “best beach umbrella to buy + discussion” which will give us the search results from the discussion groups where people discuss their buying needs:

As we can see, the gold mine of a research. Let’s dig in and see who is discussing the topic [hint: your target customers] and what issues do they mention.

The first link [Trip Advisor forum] and the first question already highlights an important topic:

Protecting from the sun while having fair skin. You know what people are searching for, and if you notice, that this topic returns often, you know this is a common issue. You found a problem you can solve [in a profitable way] with your product!

What Is Conversion Rate – Conversion Optimization Explained. Learn what is a conversion rate in an ecommerce business, and how you can improve it in order to boost sales. Video guide for beginners [watch now]: https://youtu.be/pKH1iyizh8A

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If you want to sell online, you need an online shop. A website presence showing your collections, telling about your products and allowing customers to buy your items and pay online. Shopify, offering the most advanced and tailored packages for website merchants, is a natural choice for many.

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These terrific extra long warm knee socks become a more dramatic and can change a mini skirt into a fashion statement. Everyone loves this look and it adds true style. Shop now: http://bit.ly/overthekneesocks

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Backlinks, also called “inbound links” or “incoming links,” are created when one website links to another. The link to an external website is called a backlink.

Why are backlinks important?

Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO optimization because they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another.

In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. If many sites link to the same webpage or website, search engines can infer that content is worth linking to, and therefore also worth surfacing on a SERP. So, earning these backlinks can have a positive effect on a site’s ranking position or search visibility.

Earning and giving backlinks

Earning backlinks is an essential component of off-site SEO optimization. The process of obtaining these links is known as link earning or link building.

Some backlinks are inherently more valuable than others. Followed backlinks from trustworthy, popular, high-authority sites are considered the most desirable backlinks to earn, while backlinks from low-authority, potentially spammy sites are typically at the other end of the spectrum. Whether or not a link is followed (i.e. whether a site owner specifically instructs search engines to pass, or not pass, link equity) is certainly relevant, but don’t entirely discount the value of nofollow links. Even just being mentioned on high-quality websites can give your brand a boost.

Just as some backlinks you earn are more valuable than others, links you create to other sites also differ in value. When linking out to an external site, the choices you make regarding the page from which you link (its page authority, content, search engine accessibility, and so on) the anchor text you use, whether you choose to follow or nofollow the link, and any other meta tags associated with the linking page can have a heavy impact on the value you confer.

Search engines like Google rely on links for a number of reasons. Putting your website’s SEO and ranking aside for a moment, the “World Wide Web” was named as such for a reason: with its series of pages and websites connected together by links, it really does resemble a web. Links add context, and tell the “spiders” that crawl the Internet that there are more pages to be found through the backlinks that exist there.

Let’s say you have a brand new website. No one links to it, and you don’t submit it to Google, either. How do you expect it to be found? You can’t! However, if someone links to your site, a search engine spider can crawl through that link, discover your site, and index (or make findable) your newly created content. This is one reason that backlinks are so important: without them, search engines won’t know that your content is there, nor will users.

Now let’s return to SEO. Links are an important part of Google’s ranking algorithm. Generally speaking, the more relevant, high quality backlinks you have pointing at your website, the better you will rank in searches for your targeted keywords. So it is desirable to have these kinds of backlinks, because ranking highly can increase your traffic, purchases, conversion rate, and so on.

This doesn’t mean that you should go out and try to acquire links from every powerful-looking website on the Internet. Google’s algorithms are so complex that a link’s relevance will be just as important as its source. So while it may feel good for your pet supplies store to get a link from your friend’s popular marketing blog, it may not help you rank any better.